ZohoDay 24 Dev Stories Ep.4: Brigade Plus Transforms CX

March 31, 2024

Final Episode 4 of the ZohoDay24 Development Stories series

In this installment of the Intellyx video series, Zoho Development Stories, we replay our most interesting interviews from ZohoDay 2024 in McAllen, Texas. This episode, hosted by Jason Bloomberg, features Ponappa PM, Head at Brigade Plus.

Brigade Plus transforms sales management and customer journeys with Zoho CRM. Read the whole case study here: https://www.zoho.com/crm/customers/brigade-plus.html

Full transcript of this interview:

Jason: Hi, this is Jason Bloomberg, Managing Director of Intellyx, and I’m here with Ponappa PM, a head of Brigade Plus. So, welcome Ponappa, and thanks for, thanks for joining me. So, why don’t you tell us a bit, just give us an overall picture of what Brigade Plus is, and the overall story of the company.

Ponappa: To tell you a bit about Brigade Plus, I first need to tell you about the Brigade Group, which is the parent organization. The Brigade Group is one of India’s largest real estate developers. We are a 37-year-old company. We are a publicly traded company. And a majority of our value creation is in the residential, commercial, and retail sector asset space.

So we’ve actually been one of those companies that has been focused on technology for quite some time. In fact one of the first implementations of SAP. In the real estate space in India was in our organization. Brigade Plus is the value added services for Brigade.

And our thought process was really to kind of figure out, in the entire life cycle of the purchase journey with Brigade for our customers, we wanted to see where we could add a little more value and where the customer could benefit from their association with us. So we started off with what I would consider low hanging fruit in this space.

We build a home, they buy the home, we build the home. But of course, whether someone needs to rent out the home, whether someone needs to actually live in that space, they probably need to do their interiors. So interiors is the first you know, business that we kind of went after. And we’ve been doing that for about three years now.

And under the value added again, we also help our customers resell the property should they wish to do that. And we also have them let it out and rent it out, should they wish to do that.

That’s typically what we’ve been doing right now. There is a third arm that handles software development and the thought process behind developing software in-house to kind of enhance the seamless living experience we want our customers to have after they move into our properties.

Jason: So tell us a bit about how Brigade Plus got into Zoho. What was your first Zoho app and how did you get started?

Ponappa: I got started by searching on Google and really looking for a CRM software. I went to Google, searched for CRM solutions, and I got Zoho. We knew CRM was the starting point for us, right? There’s a bunch of things you need to do downline, but I think for any new organization, lead management is probably the most crucial part because once the sales start coming in. You know, like a typical startup.

That’s when you figure out the supply chain, down the line. So we went and subscribed to Zoho CRM after considering a bunch of other options. I’ve previously had experience in implementation of SAP, Salesforce within the organization. So those are tools we were already familiar with.

And I looked at Zoho CRM and found a few things that I believed were fairly unique, especially with regard to the workflow management that one could program into it. I was quite intrigued by the lead management and the lead nurturing portion of the journey that we could build onto the system.

So that’s kind of why we chose CRM. But moving from there, I think for us, it’s been it’s been a journey where we have now expanded. We use about nine or 10 Zoho products and all of them, you know, talk to each other. They integrated with each other to kind of fulfill the entire supply chain journey.

For our customer and really the thought process over there now anyway for us is before we look for a tech solution, I usually call my Zoho rep and ask, Hey, do you have a solution for this? Right. If they do, it’s the easiest thing in the world to get it to work with everything else. So that’s kind of how we’ve been approaching it.

Jason: So you said that you had some experience in your organization with Salesforce, but you went with Zoho CRM anyway. So, what was the thought process there? How is Zoho able to displace the well-known CRM players in this space?

Ponappa: I think one of the biggest considerations for me, having worked with Salesforce earlier was the level of customization that I wanted to achieve was a little difficult to do in Salesforce from at least in our exploratory stage.

What we discovered about Zoho CRM is that the number of customizations that I could do was significantly better and suited our use case. But not just that. I think cost was also a big factor. I think Zoho came at a fraction of the cost for us and that was a big motivator because this was also a business we see growing quite rapidly and consuming a lot of licenses.

When we started off, it was me, one member, right? We are about 70 plus right now, and in the next year we’re expecting to cross about 200, right? So, when we talk about scale and scalability, I think cost really kicks in, and that actually compounds multifold.

So, we were cautious about making that decision based on cost, but apart from that, we also found that, like for like, we got equal, if not more, value for money, because of the features and because of the product itself.

Jason: I’d like to drill down a little more on the customization. Because, Salesforce will say that you can customize that product as well. So what did you actually do as an organization to customize the Zoho CRM and how did you go about the customization?

Ponappa: On the customization front, I think the first thing that really comes to mind is with Salesforce. We actually needed a lot of external support to get that customization done. Most of the customization that we do within Zoho, we do ourselves. We have team members who are working on sandbox and are able to do it because effectively CRM specifically is a no code platform.

I can achieve most of what I want to do in terms of workflows and customizations simply by dragging and dropping and writing very simple blueprints or very simple rules. So I think that was one distinguishing factor for us from our experience in Salesforce, which is from 2012 onwards.

But secondly, and more importantly, with regard to the workflows themselves, when we spoke to the teams at Zoho, I think one of the things that became very clear is that we would be able to match and map the customer lifecycle journey end-to-end with the suite of products that they have. We knew when we got into Zoho CRM that at some point in time the entire journey, including the accounting bit, including the survey bit, calculation of NPS, calculation of CSAT project management project issued redressals, Zoho Desk.

We knew all of these things could be plugged in eventually when we needed it. Think of it like Lego, right? We bought a basic set and we started setting that up knowing full well that should we need any other ancillary services, we could always plug them in. I think that was one of the key deciding factors for us.

Jason: You are right, just like Lego. You start with the basic set before long, you’re building the Millennium Falcon. So It just works. So the Zoho applications already come pre-integrated. That’s one of the best. benefits of Zoho, but you also mentioned SAP and other applications. So are you integrating Zoho apps with other apps that aren’t Zoho apps?

And what is the integration story ?

Ponappa: So the short answer is yes, we are integrating with multiple third party applications. SAP is just one of them. We also integrate with a provider, a payment gateway called Razorpay, because all of our transactions with customers are digital.

So, they receive a link and make a payment online either through UPI, which is a payment format that’s available in India, or they use net banking. That’s one use case where we are actually integrating with a third party.

Another place, of course, is with the SAP database because ultimately, for me, we are a value-added services arm for the Brigade Group. I focus on customers that the parent company has already won. And downstream, I figured out for me, every customer of Brigade Group is a potential customer for Brigade Plus.

All of that information, whether it’s regarding their contact information that we may need to provide — make calls or emails, wherever the transactional information that I need comes in from the system. The third and fourth integrations that I could possibly talk about is going to be our telephony services, because we’ve integrated our telephony services to allow customers to have a single number to call to be connected to any of the people that they need.

We’re speaking to, whether it’s a salesperson, whether it’s somebody in design, whether it’s a CRM representative, so we use those integration services as well. And thirdly, we integrate with O365 for our email clients.

Jason: So many organizations that have SAP think of SAP as sort of the center of gravity, right?

They build their whole business around ERP and how ERP sort of drives the business. Is that still the case, or? Has the center of gravity for at least for Brigade Plus shifted to the Zoho CRM product because CRM can be the center of gravity for a business when you’re customer focused, right?

Ponappa: It should be not easy, though, especially with SAP still being as a public limited company, all of our reporting still needs to happen to SAP because their auditory requirements that are there.

Also our teams are used to probably consuming data from SAP, our auditors. I used to consuming data from SAP. So that center of gravity still remains the ERP system. But we’re actually finding a bit of we’re making some headway over there right now because we’re now able to kind of at least convince internal teams and auditors that, hey, I want all of this transactional information is available on Zoho.

I’m going to have it on Books, and Books is equally good, if not better, as an accounting tool or record keeping mechanism. We are actually now working towards a system where we’ll be able to integrate books directly with SAP and push all of that information directly. So there are no auditory requirements.

Your challenge becomes when you’re downloading something into an Excel and then uploading it. We want to just create that link, so there are no audit related requirements and challenges. And as soon as we reach that, I think we’ll be able to actually think of CRM as the center of gravity, at least within Brigade Plus.

Jason: So there’s a question I have to ask, since it’s 2024, and that is: what is your AI story? And how are you incorporating AI into your Zoho efforts?

Ponappa: Yeah. AI is a relatively new project for us internally anyway. I know there’s a lot that’s been spoken about for the last one and a half, two odd years, but it’s really blown up.

We’re using a for a couple of things. First, and I think the most prevalent use case within our organization is to get sentiment analysis off emails and to reply to those emails. So we have integrated ChatGPT with Zoho Desk, and that actually allows our team members to save a lot of time by not going through pages of emails, but clicking a button, waiting a few seconds and getting just the gist of the entire story and the sentiment of the customer, right?

So I think that that is really helpful and it’s pretty good because, you know, the tool actually throws out all of the relevant dates. That you have the interactions, et cetera — that’s pretty good. But we also use the same tool in just another tab to actually formulate a response to the customer. So if I just click on a button, the suggested response from ChatGPT comes in.

And then the team looks at it, analyzes it, uses the relevant portions in their emails and sends it across. We found that the teams use it quite a bit and they’re happy with it because it actually saves time. A lot of time of just typing if nothing else, right? And they’re also able to generate more cohesive responses in terms of the structure of the language.

And that is important given the context that in India and for my team, for the majority of my team members, English is not their first language. Right? And however, English is the first language of business and language of communication with our customers. So it does make their lives a lot easier.

And those are two use cases where I think my users are directly using inputs from AI to service our customers. Apart from that, we also use AI in the analytics portion of it. Analytics for trend analysis and to be able to kind of predict when we expect a certain deal to close, what the average deal closure times has been.

That’s also something we’re finding good value in.

Jason: Very good. So you described a few of the benefits of the AI part of the story, but tell us a bit more broadly about the overall benefits your organization’s gotten from Zoho.

Ponappa: I think My biggest benefit really that we’ve seen after implementing Zoho is that efficiency of my team members is significantly higher than the industry average in let’s say the interior space.

I want to say. I know for a fact that our salespeople outsell any other competitor we have.

Jason: That’s because you have good sales people, right?

Ponappa: But not just right not just I mean, you’re absolutely right. I’d like to believe we have a phenomenal sales team but it’s also the usage of the tools that they have to make them more efficient, right?

That’s something that I really think we’re doing well. I also know that our design teams churn out more design per designer than our closest competitor. Productivity benefits. Yes. So it’s definitely productivity benefits, but also apart from that, I think the user journey and the user experience that our customers get is something that I think is our biggest win, right?

It takes away the human dependency on a lot of process driven interactions that need to happen with the customer. For example, if you have purchased a product from us and you have gone ahead and this is all sounds so obvious, right? And there are people out there saying, Amazon’s doing it, right?

And there are high tech companies that are doing it. What we have to keep in mind is we are not a tech company. We’re a brick-and-mortar real estate company and adoption of tech in real estate, at least in India, is extremely low, right?

So actually it’s quite in the traditional sense, now, not groundbreaking, but if you look at it from an industry perspective, the fact that when a customer makes a payment, they immediately get an email acknowledging that the payment has been made, and saying that “so-and-so is the designer that has been assigned to you.”

The designer will call you in 48 hours. The task is being set for the designer automatically. The knowledge transfer is being done automatically between two modules. The reminder going to the designer saying that, hey, read this file so you have the knowledge transfer. Call this customer on such and such time, preschedule the call, automating the emails that goes out, automating the calls that go out.

This significantly improves the customers experience and therefore their expectation of us. Because depending on how you talk to a customer, this could vary, right? You and 20 other salespeople all have their style and method off interacting with customers.

But as a brand, we’d like to maintain some level off I would say uniformity. In the language that we use, in the way we’d like to communicate and again, coming back to the fact some of these things I know out here at least in the U.S. you may take for granted, but given that again, English is not the first language for a lot of the team members, I think it is important to give them the additional help that could actually enhance the customer experience.

Very good.

Jason: So final question. What’s next? What is your future with the Zoho product line?

Ponappa: The way we’ve approached it so far like I think I touched upon it at the beginning of my interview. Now whenever I need a tech solution, I usually call my Zoho rep and say, Hey, do you have a solution for this?

And it’s when they say, no, we don’t have it is when I start looking outside. But I think brass tacks, the way we’d like to look at it is we’d want our end to end journey, including our financial transactions and settlements to happen on Zoho, because I think there is a huge opportunity that we are not capitalizing on right now by leaving that accounting part out of the equation.

And I feel like when we bring that in, the end-to-end customer journey is going to be significantly more enriched, and therefore lead to better future conversions for me and better customer experience and better brand equity for us.

Jason: Well, thank you very much. That’s all the time we have. So we’ve been speaking with Ponappa from Brigade Plus.

This is Jason Bloomberg with Intellyx. Thank you very much.

Ponappa: Thank you, Jason. Really appreciate it.